Sots and Snots: The Specter of Authenticity in Performance Scripts

In Shakespeare'sThe Comedy of Errors, the first time Adriana and Luciana meet the Antipholus and Dromio from Syracuse, Luciana exclaims to Dromio:

Why prat'st thou to thyself and answer'st not?
Dromio, thou drone, thou snail, thou slug, thou sot! (2.2.192-3) ¹

On one particular night during a production at the Georgia Shakespeare Festival for which I was dramaturg, the actress playing Luciana (Lisa Paulsen) got momentarily tongue-tied and the last word came out "snot" instead of "sot." ² The audience laughed, as they had not done at this line before. The actress deliberately made the substitution in every performance thereafter and got a laugh each time. We discussed the matter, and, though I have always thought of myself as a dramaturg who put what "works" over what was vaguely proper, I found myself conflicted. Audiences expect comedies, Shakespearean or otherwise, to be funny, so the success of a comedy is often determined by how much laughing goes on. Anything that consistently gets a laugh without doing violence to the production thus has to be at least considered. But my literary sensibilities were injured. This wasn't Shakespeare.

On the other hand, what is Shakespeare exactly, particularly when we are talking not biography or history or even literature, but theatre? How do we negotiate the relationship between the theatrical Shakespeare and his other cultural incarnations, particularly in matters of what happens onstage under the name of that supreme cultural authority, and howdo we treat the vexed question of what is "authentic" Shakespeare and what is not in ways that allow usto produce dynamic and engaging theatre? These questions cut to the heart of one essential piece of dramaturgical work: the preparation of the performance script.

In what follows I will argue that, contrary to the editing practices employed in the production of a reading text, the construction of a performance script permits, even demands, modification of the textual "original" in order to render that original theatrically communicative in the present. Viewing Shakespeare culturally rather than ontologically, the dominant concerns of script modification are seen to be rooted not in questions of a dilution or violation but in how to negotiate audience expectations. If the alterations are made so that they pass largely unnoticed, the staging can function as a new artistic product related to the original but, like all Shakespearean productions, an adaptation of that original, and without jarring the audience out of its problematic assumptions about the nature and authority of the Shakespearean text. Ultimately, I am less interested in maintaining original meaning, and even less in maintaining original wording for its own sake, than I am in maintaining a coherence to the production which is informed by a reading of that original.

My concerns in this paper are ultimately material and specific in that they deal with the way we construct a performance script, but I think it helpful to begin by revisiting a theoretical question about what such a script is and how it relates both to the Shakespearean text and to the way theatre produces meaning. If we can clarify the ways we claim authority for a script, then we can consider how to go about composing that script under the very concrete conditions of practical stagecraft.

Text, Script, and Authenticity

Critic Linda Shenk recognizes a significant directorial interpolation in the closing tableau of the BBC's Richard III, in which a cackling Margaret cradles Richard's body in a kind of "reverse Pieta," an image which, she says, radically affects the meaning of the production despite its nonverbal nature. Shenk sees the feminist directorial slant as "redirecting" Shakespeare's play, the final stage image "subverting the playwright who creates his art through language" (34). This, we are to assume from her tone, is a bad thing. Even a production that adheres to the "masculine spirit" of the play but deviates from the letter...